The ad giant's co-founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin now head up Alphabet as CEO and president.

Google, meanwhile, has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the holding company.

Page and Brin now get to play with their other toys, such as driverless car tech, while Pichai will run the multinational's search, advertising, video, browser and operating system businesses – the bread and butter stuff.

We should also start to see how Google will function as a supposedly more "slimmed down" outfit now that its vanity projects have been slotted into Alphabet.

It would be a mistake for anyone to see this strategy shift as anything other than an attempt at making Google and indeed Alphabet an even more powerful company, however.

The company said in a statement about the Alphabet merger:

Google anticipates that shares of Google Class C Capital Stock and shares of Google Class A Common Stock will begin trading as Alphabet Class C Capital Stock and Alphabet Class A Common Stock, respectively, on the NASDAQ Global Select Market on 5 October 2015.

Shares of Alphabet Class C Capital Stock and shares of Alphabet Class A Common Stock will continue to be traded under the same ticker symbols under GOOG and GOOGL, respectively.

From early next year, the company will report its results under two biz operations, at which point we may get a better idea about how much cash Google Alphabet has been slinging at its moonshots. ®